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On June 29 and 30, the International Conference on Climate Change and Coral Reef Conservation (organized by the Ministry of Environment and Okinawa Prefecture with the support of OIST and the University of the Ryukyus) was held at the OIST campus. Environment Minister Nobuteru Ishihara was guided around the OIST campus and visited the Energy Materials and Surface Sciences Unit (led by Prof. Yabing Qi), in which new solar energy materials are being developed. He also stopped by at the Marine Genomics Unit (led by Prof. Noriyuki Satoh), which conducts genome research of marine organisms such as corals.

  Dr. Garth Ilsley, in Prof Nicholas Luscombe’s Genomics and Regulatory Systems Unit at OIST and Assistant Professor Angela DePace at Harvard Medical School succeeded in modelling early regulation of development in the fruit fly Drosophila using a statistical approach that accurately predicts gene expression in the whole embryo. This study was published in the open access journal, eLIFE, on August 6th. This figure is comparison of calculated results from the model (upper half) with image data from an actual embryo (lower half). It can be seen that the mutations in stripes 3 and 7 due to the misexpression of kni (A) and hb (B) are consistent. (A) Misexpression of kni is seen as a thinner stripe 3, and stripe 3 is also cut when there are 2 copies of the transgene. (B) Misexpression of hb results in bulging, bending and cutting of stripe 3. Stripe 7 bulges when there are 2 copies of the transgene. Stripe 2 remains unaffected in both cases. 

OIST President Jonathan Dorfan at the Groundbreaking Ceremony

Lab 3 construction site

A model of IBM2 function. Top: IBM2 facilitates mRNA (red boxes) transcription over the intragenic heterochromatin (black box and lollipops). Blue boxes represent exons. Bottom: The ibm2 mutant, which cannot produce functional IBM2 protein. mRNA transcription terminates prematurely without a functional IBM2 protein.